Seagate today announced the 1 terabyte (TB) Barracuda 7200.11 and Barracuda ES.2 hard drives for consumer and enterprise markets. As the industry's only second-generation desktop and enterprise perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) hard drives, the Barracuda 7200.11 and Barracuda ES.2 deliver 1TB of capacity, 7,200-rpm spin speeds, average seek times of 8.5ms, caches up to 32MB and Seagate's industry-leading five-year limited warranty. Seagate's newest hard drives pack 1TB of data on just four discs to provide cool operating temperatures and low power consumption, which help extend drive life. The Barracuda ES.2 and 7200.11 will begin shipping in volume during the third quarter. The 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 will be offered at an MSRP of $399.99.

The Barracuda ES.2 hard drive's robust new features stand out in performance, reliability, capacity, and energy efficiency. Among them is its new RVFF (Rotational Vibration Feed Forward) system, designed to sustain performance in densely-packed multi-drive systems. The Barracuda ES.2 also boosts reliability with an industry-best unrecoverable error rate that is 10 times better than desktop class drives and a 1.2 million hour Mean Time Between Failure at full 24 x 7 data availability.

With the introduction of the Barracuda ES.2, Seagate is first to provide customers with a SAS interface option in addition to SATA. SAS offers greater levels of reliability, data integrity and performance for business-critical and nearline enterprise environments. The choice of SATA or SAS also enables greater system-design and integration flexibility for solution builders and OEMs.

"EqualLogic's customers have an insatiable demand for increasing capacities and high performance in their networked storage solutions," said John Joseph, vice president of Marketing at EqualLogic. "Seagate's strategy of offering a SAS or SATA version of a 1TB disk drive demonstrates leadership in recognizing that customers want high performance and high capacity disks for enterprise storage. Serving both needs with a single interface like SAS simplifies technology design decisions and customer choices."

Seagate's new PowerTrim( technology is integrated into the Barracuda ES.2 and dynamically manages drive power consumption at all levels of activity. With PowerTrim(, the Barracuda ES.2 addresses the IT dilemma facing energy-constrained data centers by delivering a 20% reduction in overall drive power consumption and a best-in-class 55% reduction in watts-per-gigabyte.

Desktop Storage - Barracuda 7200.11
Award-winning Barracuda hard drives are the industry standard for computing applications ranging from mainstream, high-performance and gaming PCs to workstations and desktop RAID. Now with over 42 million PMR Seagate drives already shipped, the proven technology and components of the 11th generation Barracuda 7200-Series hard drive enables Seagate to deliver high-volume shipments of the 1TB drive with the highest levels of quality and reliability - essential in ensuring long drive life.

"Seagate is a valued and trusted supplier to Nor-Tech, and has always maintained the highest levels of field-proven reliability with consistent product delivery," said David Bollig, president of Nor-Tech. "We look forward to enhancing our portfolio of offerings using Seagate's new Barracuda drives that will offer even more choice and value for Nor-Tech's customers."

The Barracuda 7200.11 stands alone in performance among high-capacity desktop hard drives, with category-leading 105MB/s sustained transfer rate - the highest ever. And with a low power rating of 8 watts at idle, the Barracuda 7200.11 is not only energy-efficient, but also operates cooler, increasing reliability. Barracuda 7200.11 also delivers industry-leading acoustics, as low as 2.7 Bels, which is nearly undetectable by the human ear.

Along with the energy-saving statements, this is the only statement I am interested in:
because the 7200.10 was not very popular among the silence-community (unlike Western Digital WD5000AAKS and Samsung HD501LJ drives which are still somewhat popular).

I'd be very happy to see silent Seagate drives again, good old 7200.7 series~
Especially because of the warranty, because Seagate is supposed to be easier to RMA in Europa than other brands.

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Hell yes their easier to RMA....Or at least I had no problems with getting it RMA's. the only problem I had was when the drive 'bought the farm' after having it for less then 3weeks (the drive started developing delayed read & write errors constantly, it would totally freeze or even BSOD when i tried to salvage my data)

Needless to say I lost alot of data due to that HDD going down & ever since Seagate sent me a replacement drive all I did was shove it into a test rig where I can thrash it about

I can't wait till the price comes down. But as long as the 320GB Seagates are only $80, I'd personally rather have 5 of them @ 1.6TB for the same price. Only difference there besides the noise, mentioned previously, is the 32MB cache..... and maybe if you're using an external inclosure and want to take it on the road.... it sounds like you're mainly paying for the convenience.

But it would take up more space, generate more heat, more problems could occur etc. etc.

Who here really needs that much space?

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True, more heat and space would be problematic. However, I think it would be safer for data, akin to RAID striping, as if 1 drive failed, you would still have the rest (as most servers do these days). A single drive with that amount of storage is just asking for trouble.

But it would take up more space, generate more heat, more problems could occur etc. etc.

Who here really needs that much space?

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Agree with power, heat and space issue. My desktop is currently running 2 HDD and a swap HDD bay. Real pain. No room to add another 2/3 drives in the case... plus all the heat etc. no good. This is a nice option.

Who needs the space? If you are a youngster-home-user then not. But if you are a small business/corporate then most definitely. You need to back up your data not once, but grandfather it. A "working" 200GB needs 400GB of backup space.

Along with the energy-saving statements, this is the only statement I am interested in:
because the 7200.10 was not very popular among the silence-community (unlike Western Digital WD5000AAKS and Samsung HD501LJ drives which are still somewhat popular).

I'd be very happy to see silent Seagate drives again, good old 7200.7 series~
Especially because of the warranty, because Seagate is supposed to be easier to RMA in Europa than other brands.

Click to expand...

Yeah comparing 750GB 7200.10 to the 1TB 7200.11:

10 - idle 2.8B seek 3.7B
11 - idle 2.7B seek 2.9B

So it looks like Seagate has finally gotten automatic acoustic management (AAM) back in their drives again with an 8dB decrease in seek noise. Hopefully that high-pitched "pure tone" that a few of the .10s had isn't around anymore

Agree with power, heat and space issue. My desktop is currently running 2 HDD and a swap HDD bay. Real pain. No room to add another 2/3 drives in the case... plus all the heat etc. no good. This is a nice option.

Who needs the space? If you are a youngster-home-user then not. But if you are a small business/corporate then most definitely. You need to back up your data not once, but grandfather it. A "working" 200GB needs 400GB of backup space.

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Ah, I was not thinking about the corporate-end user, but rather the home user.

I've been debating on getting a 500gig drive just for backing up my data too.. thier so cheap now adays.. though I may just wait and see how the price performance ratio is when the new 10k NCQ hd's by seagate come out.. than use one or both of my current 320gb drives for backup... though it better be alot faster lol... to may things to upgrade on comp